Ars Technica sits down with Scott Collins from Mozilla.org

During this past Spring's Penguicon, Ars had a chance to sit down with Mozilla …

This summer the Mozilla foundation will release Firefox 1.0. Based on the soon-to-be-released Mozilla 1.7 code base, Firefox 1.0 marks another milestone in the existence of "Mozilla" as the evolution of the Netscape code base since it was released as Open Source in 1998.

As one can imagine, such a long and colorful history is bound to have its ups and downs. We ran into Scott Collins at this year's Penguicon and had a talk about Netscape, Mozilla, software development, and the web in general.

It took a lot of things all happening together to make the web work and one key piece of that was the Netscape browser, and that became part of the conciousness of the world, and that's the thing I learned to lust after as a programmer. It's not my ability to solve one problem, to plow this field, but the ability to build a plow that every farmer uses. The ability to make something that touches not ten people, not a hundred people, not a thousand people but a hundred million people.

Scott Collins was hired into Netscape in 1996 and was in the trenches during the "Browser Wars" all the way through to the axe cut at America Online of the Netscape team. A veteran software engineer, Scott has also worked on the Newton software at Apple Computer, and for Macromedia working on what would eventually be sold as Final Cut Pro. Read on for his insights into what Mozilla did right and wrong, why there are two Mozilla browsers for Mac OS X, and much, much more.